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Well I’ll just be very honest here and say I wasn’t all that fond of how this period for multiple reasons. The project was all over the place.

After losing 2 of our teammates (which admittedly weren’t all too productive for their own reasons) only a little while after creating our partnership’s agreement and only 2 weeks left to finish it all up we were left in peril.

The monday after we concluded there was no way for our Arduino to interact with our web based application and thus had to think of alternative means of a sensor in our project.

Then wednesday it was decided, after it was shown off, that we would instead be using a Leap Motion as a means to interact and thus effectively ditch the Arduino.

With Maurice focussing on the front-end and Dagmar on the back-end, I was left in between as an all rounder helping where I can, while also taking up the task of getting the Leap Motion working.

All summed up, I wasn’t exactly proud of the end result, with the only point I find myself having contributed to was feedback. I can see what went wrong, I can reflect on it, but that’s about it as far as the other points listed below go, and I’ll leave it to the others to decide if as a result I succeeded this sprint/period, or not.

We just lost 2 teammates, and I was pulled away for a seperate conversation with a personally appointed peercoach regarding what to do about my currently earned Building Blocks, or rather lack thereof. This conversation, while appreciated, stretched on for a while eventually resulting in us reaching the end of the day, with research into the Building Blocks and how I planned to earn at least 9, but optimally all 12 of them in the time I had left. Although important this did take away time that could have been spent on the project.

Also, while we might have neglected making use of user stories, because we didn’t feel like there was still time to work on that, it didn’t help from an ambition perspective, at least in my case. Come wednesday with one week left to spend on the project, we decided to ditch the Arduino, for which we couldn’t figure out a way to interact with our web application in the time we had left, in favor of the Leap Motion. This presented a challenge for me as I had never worked with that before, but it was a better alternative to having no working sensor whatsoever.

Now here’s where I say the user stories could’ve gotten in handy:

We had decided that I would be working on implementing the Leap Motion, but not how it should be implemented. I did research into it over the weekend about how I could possibly create custom gestures which, while difficult, seemed feasible, which I think might have been the idea for our project, but I didn’t know what was expected of me other than to “get it working”. I didn’t know what/if custom gestures were expected, I didn’t if such was the case, what the gestures would do, just that it had “to work”, so come wednesday we had to Frankenstein together our work, all I really contributed was a readily available Leap Motion driver, which I only had to configure a little bit, with which I could navigate not just the website, but potentially my entire computer. Not exactly what I would call ambitious but in the very least it worked I suppose.

Yes I helped Dagmar debug here and there where, and I adviced/provided feedback to Maurice (specifically I told him to make use of Bootstrap for the front-end), and also made (him make) some changes in order for the front-end to come together, but ambition was lacking.

The only thing I could potentially see myself earning anything for. The monday I was left alone there were multiple people recommending me that I should create a partnership’s agreement.

While I initially put off the idea to do so that monday, the wednesday after I decided that perhaps it was better to do so anyway and thus started working on it with Maurice, seeing as it could provide for the content required for “Being a Boss” we both still need.

After taking in some more feedback from Imani, specifically regarding the part about consequences, I applied those to what we had and finished the partnerships agreement, which I have a seperate post about here (in Dutch).

This is the only part of the project of which I could say we (me & Maurice) really delivered. Shortly before the second retrospective I also consulted Dieuwertje, one of judges of the “Being a boss” Block to explain our current situation and if she felt the consequences were stern enough. After hearing her side of it (regarding the strike system versus the time we had left to spend on the project) applied said feedback to what we had and could consider our partnership agreement truly finished, ready to be signed.

Leading on, only half the time and effort seemed to have gone into our maquette as opposed to just about everyone else.

We might have viewed it as a waste of time, but we also made it so, because at least while the other groups had something presentable by the end of it, I was left alone to present, or pitch, our “maquette” the monday we had to, which really was only marginally better looking than the paper protoype, to everyone.

It didn’t help that, apart from me having personal issues I won’t delve into right now, the part of being absolutely alone that monday didn’t exactly improve the by this point already paltry team morale.

Thus the point of creativity we could have earned on the maquette has went to waste along with planning.

Ignoring the fact that teammates seemed to be missing around half the time entering the third week, the first so many weeks seemed like a waste of time to us, me included, because the focus of those weeks fell on the paper prototype and maquette as opposed to the coding of the project.

As a result we were mostly going back and forth with ideas and in my opinion, and I’m not exempt from this either, screwing around as opposed to being productive.

We considered the focus of the first few weeks a waste of time and as such have made it so. Time has been wasted, because there was no planning and no division of tasks. The lack of a concise planning continued for most of the project, only having a rough division of tasks by the end of it.

As part of my aim to make it this year I need, absolutely need to ace my retakes.

As such I took up the advice of both my SLC Monique Smeets and my personally assigned Peercoach Donnie Beusekamp and contacted the 2 teachers concerning the subjects I have to retake.

For Designing (Ontwerpen), it was pretty straight forward, I have to download and go through every slide, and if I have any questions left I can ask them in class or email him (My teacher, Ruben Bos) about it.

As for Programming, I have contacted Bob Pikaar, my teacher that period, about it, and will now have to wait for an answer. In the mean time I will consult Pluralsight regarding PHP, which is what the subject was about, and accrue knowledge through that, and then apply that knowledge to the exercises we had during the classes.

Of course this should not interfere with the subjects I’ve got this period, which I also need to pass, but that should speak for itself.

The subject of the conversation was about my current results and how they haven’t been looking all to pretty lately, as well as how we’re going to go about turning that around.

Long story short, there’s basically no wiggle room:

I only passed 2 exams, currently I am in the red as far as CLE 2 is concerned, and it ain’t going pretty with CLE 3 all things considered. I spoiled the 2 retakes of the exams I had to pass in the first period, and will need to retake 2 from last period once again.

It basically comes down to me now having to make a concise planning as to how I’m going to accomplish all these different tasks, not simply because others requested that but also for myself.

Below I will list 3 links regarding what has to be done and how I [pland got do it in order to make it this year.